Using such time-honored tactics as stealing her organizer, sneaking into her bedroom, and rocking the mic at the local all-ages juice bar, Johnny gradually makes headway with Kathy, at least until her paranoid dad makes her call it off.
Johnny, who initially tries – and surprisingly fails – to impress Kathy by spooking her horse, spends most of this unscheduled downtime laying siege to her heart, much to the displeasure of her creepy, Eric Trump-like boyfriend (John Haymes Newton). But when one of their bikes breaks down in Kathy’s town, they’re forced to cool their heels ( and eat disgusting sandwiches) at the Pee Wee’s Playhouse-esque home of eccentric motorcycle repairman Roscoe (Sydney Lassick). Like most rappers, Johnny and his posse go from gig to gig via motorcycle. The basic plot resembles one of Elvis’ least memorable films crossed with a Lifetime movie: Traveling rapper Johnny (Ice, in all his flat-topped, Stussy-swathed glory) romances a small-town girl (Kristin Minter, whose Wikipedia bio includes this downer of a sentence: “She is best known for playing the role of Kathy Winslow in the Vanilla Ice vehicle Cool as Ice“), but she can’t keep seeing him because her dad ( Family Ties patriarch Michael Gross) is in the witness-protection program. Watching the film now, a quarter-century after its initial release, it’s kind of shocking to see just how shoddy the whole thing is, even by popstar cash-in standards. (Though widely excoriated by critics, the record still sold well enough to reach #30 on the Billboard 200.) A month later, production began on Cool as Ice the film was co-produced by Koppleman/Bandier-Carnegie Pictures, an entity headed by SBK honchos Charles Koppleman and Martin Bandier. In March 1991, just six months after the release of To the Extreme, SBK rushed out Extremely Live, a thoroughly inessential live album padded out with Ice’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” presented in both studio and concert versions. At the time, the mainstream music biz still primarily viewed rap artists as novelty acts (a la Tone-Loc and Young MC), and SBK clearly wanted to squeeze as much cash out of Vanilla Ice as they could before he became yesterday’s Kangol. Though Ice saw himself as a legit rapper, his label, SBK Records, had little interest in bolstering his credibility beyond disseminating a few false claims about his “ghetto” upbringing. (The pair reportedly broke up over his objections to her coffee table book Sex, in which he also appeared.) Forbes magazine’s 1991 list of highest-paid entertainers had Ice at number 40, with earnings of $18 million - though several of those millions apparently went into the pocket of Suge Knight, who allegedly shook Ice down for the publishing rights to “Ice Ice Baby,” then used the proceeds to help launch Death Row Records. The album that spawned it, the laughably-titled To the Extreme, spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard 200, selling over seven million copies in the US alone.Īs the acceptable white face of mainstream hip-hop, Ice (born Robert Van Winkle) scored endorsement deals with Coca-Cola and Nike, landed a part in Teenage Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze, and even dated Madonna for eight months. Less than a year earlier, Vanilla Ice and his bland brand of pop-rap had been all but inescapable: “Ice Ice Baby,” his lunkheaded but catchy track built around the sampled bassline from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” topped the US pop charts in the fall of 1990, becoming the first hip-hop single ever to do so.
Released 25 years ago today, the film flopped spectacularly with critics and audiences alike, ranking only fourteenth among that week’s new releases - nine spots behind Ernest Scared Stupid - and ultimately failing to recoup even a quarter of its modest $6 million production budget at the box office.Ĭoming roughly a month after Nirvana’s Nevermind unexpectedly exploded out of the gates, the movie’s box-office thud felt like part of the same pop-cultural paradigm shift. But if it were, you can bet your last bong hit that it would at least be more entertaining than Cool as Ice, the rapper’s ill-fated 1991 bid for cinematic stardom.
VANILLA ICE COOL AS ICE SERIES
Earlier this month, when Vanilla Ice announced via Twitter that he was boldly defying instructions to evacuate his Florida home in the face of Hurricane Matthew, it not only inspired what had to be the greatest (and possibly also the most depressing) tweet ever made by the Florida Democratic Party, but it also made one hope that it might really be a sneaky promo for an upcoming Weather Channel series wherein the rapper and reality TV star goes head to head with natural disasters.Īlas, “The Ice Storm” (or whatever they might call it) doesn’t actually seem to be in the works.
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